President Obama signed an arms-reduction treaty with Russia's Dmitry Medvedev in Prague Thursday morning. While Reagan’s self-appointed defenders on the right are decrying Obama’s new nuclear plan, his former secretary of State, George Shultz, tells John Avlon he sees a continuity of vision between the two presidents.
“I believe we’ve come to the point that we must go at the matter of realistically reducing… if not totally eliminating, nuclear weapons—the threat to the world.”
That wasn’t some son-of-a-hippie Obama talking. That was Ronald Wilson Reagan speaking to the New York Post editorial board on March 28, 1982. It was the first of 150 times that President Reagan publicly spoke of his desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons, as detailed in a book published last year by two of his senior policy advisers, Martin and Annelise Anderson, titled Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster.
“President Obama has picked up on the notion that we can seek a world free of nuclear weapons, and that was very strongly felt by President Reagan,” said George Shultz.
But today President Obama is being called everything from a sellout to a threat to national security for articulating a similar vision—and taking steps to reduce nuclear arsenals with a new treaty, a revised nuclear posture review, and a multinational nuclear summit in Washington next week. Among the details of the treaty Obama signed on Thursday with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia is a reported one-third reduction to both the United States’ and Russia’s deployed strategic warheads, to 1,550.
“President Obama has picked up on the notion that we can seek a world free of nuclear weapons, and that was very strongly felt by President Reagan,” the Gipper’s former secretary of State, George Shultz, told me by phone from his home near the Hoover Institution in California, after returning from a meeting with Obama in Washington on Tuesday.
“What he’s proceeding toward is trying to get to a world free of nuclear weapons,” Shultz said. “And how do you do that? You take a series of steps. First of all, since most nuclear weapons that exist are in the hands of Russia and the United States, you’ve got to start there. And since the START Treaty that was proposed by President Reagan expired last December, it’s important to get it replaced with a treaty that has verification permissions in it and continuous investigations.”
Shultz described the treaty’s broad outlines as containing “relatively modest reductions” but concluded, “I think it’s a constructive step.”
